A managed service is a service offering in which a vendor assumes operation of a portion of an enterprise's assets and provides technical services and/or supplies for such assets for a fee. As a form of outsourcing, it allows the enterprise to focus on its core business while enabling the assets of the enterprise to receive improved service at reduced cost.
One type of managed service involves managing an enterprise's printer assets and print services (i.e., a managed print service). In a managed print service, a vendor typically provides printing devices to an enterprise. Business intelligence applications can then be utilized to determine how an account is behaving with respect to revenue generation.
The notions of regular behavior and exceptional behavior are fundamental to business intelligence. When large numbers of business or economic processes are aggregated and viewed through collected data, a continuum typically results. Exceptional behavior often is the result of some discrete phenomenon or atypical usage pattern that warrants investigation. Such a phenomenon could represent an exceptional risk or opportunity for the provider of the managed print service.